Pirate Bay Releases ‘Pirate Browser’ to Thwart Censorship

The Pirate Bay is taking a stand against the increased censorship efforts it faces in several European countries. On its 10th anniversary the infamous BitTorrent site is releasing its "Pirate Browser," a fully functional web browser that allows people to access The Pirate Bay and other blocked sites just fine. The current release is Windows only but TorrentFreak is informed that Mac and Linux versions will follow soon.

The Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet.

Courts in the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site, and more are expected to follow.

Up until now The Pirate Bay has encouraged users affected by the blackout to use proxy sites. However, on its 10th anniversary they are now releasing a special “PirateBrowser” which effectively bypasses any ISP blockade.

“It’s a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible. No bundled ad-ware, toolbars or other crap, just a Pre-configured Firefox browser,” The Pirate Bay explains.

The browser is based on Firefox 23 bundled with a Tor client and some proxy configurations to speed up loading. It is meant purely as a tool to circumvent censorship and unlike the Tor browser it doesn’t provide any anonymity for its users.

“This browser is just to circumvent censorship, to remove limits on accessing sites governments don’t want you to know about,” The Pirate Bay notes.

PirateBrowser works like any other web browser and comes pre-loaded with several bookmarks for blocked sites, which aside from The Pirate Bay includes EZTV, KickassTorrents, Bitsnoop and H33T.

The browser also lists the alternative .onion addresses for both TPB and EZTV as backups to access these sites.

The Pirate Bay is not alone in its efforts to keep the Internet open and accessible. The Obama administration has spent millions of dollars on similar projects allowing citizens of oppressed regimes to access blocked websites, albeit for different reasons.

The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that “PirateBrowser” is just the first step in their efforts to fight web censorship. They are also working on a special BitTorrent-powered browser, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own.

In theory, this will allow sites to exist and update even without having a public facing website. As a result, it will be virtually impossible to block or shut them down. The first version of this new software is currently being tested but there is currently no firm launch date. More on that later.

In the meantime, the development of PirateBrowser will also continue. The current release is only available for the Windows platform but Mac and Linux versions will follow in the future.